Science and the media: 16 - 22 October

In this week’s review, Steve Corneliussen discusses the Wall Street Journal‘s front-page coverage of transformation in Silicon Valley, a Nature commentary predicting research-funding strife between scientists and engineers mainly in the UK, a Nature editorial urging improvements in China’s research culture, a Wall Street Journal editorial praising Wikipedia for editorially disempowering energetic opponents of climate skeptics, and a New York Times report on Russia’s expanding prospects for building nuclear power plants worldwide.

Wall Street Journal front page: Silicon Valley innovation evolving, expandingBelow the fold on the 22 October front page, the Wall Street Journal reports in a long article that “Silicon Valley’s start-up economy has quietly broadened beyond information technology” to include “a growing cadre of bioscience and ‘clean technology’ firms,” all “presaging a more-diversified economic base and bolstering the valley’s status as the world’s innovation hotbed.”

The article describes this diversification. “When the tech bust hit in 2000,” it recalls, “the area imploded. Dozens of tech firms shut down or scaled back.” But now, though firms like Hewlett-Packard and Google are still there, “the area’s start-up economy has branched out significantly.” The article frames the diversification in some detail within a Silicon Valley innovation history going back several decades:

The article reports that “less than a third of Silicon Valley’s work force is now employed in chips and computer manufacturing, compared with more than 50% in 1990.” Instead, “today’s start-ups include clean-tech outfits such as Bloom Energy Corp., which is working on a fuel cell to deliver energy more efficiently” and “bioscience companies like Pacific Biosciences of California Inc., which is developing a DNA sequencing process to help medicine and health research.” The reporters tell of a “magnet effect” for clean-tech and bioscience companies. They also report that some of the region’s new start-ups “are already making a move toward big-company status,” including the electric car maker Tesla Motors and the biofuels startup Codexis.

Engineer vs. scientist, cont.: Colin Macilwain at Nature

Colin Macilwain’s 21 October Nature commentary , focusing mainly on the UK, describes a “scrap” between engineers and scientists and predicts that it “will grow uglier as the spending cuts begin.”

Macilwain is, of course, a veteran science writer, but he begins by mentioning his own education in engineering and by citing what he calls engineers’ “long-standing status problem,” which he says is “best summed up by the greeting: ‘If you’re an engineer, I’ve got a lawnmower that needs fixing.’” He asserts that “the terms ‘engineering’ and ‘technology’ have been increasingly subsumed into ‘science'—in the names of institutions, in discussion of ‘science policy’, in media coverage and in popular parlance.”

He reports that the Royal Academy of Engineering has been offering public “digs” at science, for example, by questioning the practical value of particle-physics research. He recalls that as “any engineer will tell you, innovations, such as aviation and the steam engine, commonly precede scientific understanding of how things work.” He says that engineers “grumble about how the media report on science, but give almost no coverage to engineering or technology development.”

In the recent past, Macilwain believes, “divisions between engineers and scientists over how government should spend money lay largely dormant,” but have now “been stirred back to life because of threatened spending cuts, and by the realization that strong university science isn’t enough to secure industrial competitiveness.” His own view is that “there is a strong case that the UK government should focus its attention on science,” even if “some of the questions from engineers deserve answers.”

He concludes:

Nature’s editors spotlight “failings” in Chinese science culture

China’s evolving science culture, a recurring subject at Nature, comes up again in a 21 October editorial charging that “widespread and debilitating failures in China’s scientific community go on largely uncontested” and declaring that China needs to act on “failings in the research community.” Here’s the key paragraph:

The editors conclude that China must “take steps to create a system that properly monitors fraud and plagiarism, checks reasonable allegations, prosecutes libellous ones and protects whistleblowers.”

Wall Street Journal credits Wikipedia for global-warming policy switch

More than two years ago, the anthropogenic-global-warming skeptic Lawrence Solomon began a commentary at National Review Online this way:

Solomon’s column had the headline “Wikipropaganda"—identical, except for one capitalization difference, to the headline on the 21 October Wall Street Journal editorial “WikiPropaganda.”

“In theory,” wrote Solomon in 2008, “Wikipedia is a ‘people’s encyclopedia’ written and edited by the people who read it,” with a spectrum of opinion resulting—but not on global warming, Solomon stipulated. On global warming, he charged, “we get consensus, Gore-style: a consensus forged by censorship, intimidation, and deceit.”

Now the like-minded WSJ editors are saying that what “Wikipedia’s 310 million unique visitors” have been “being fed” is “not a scientific ‘consensus,’” but “censorship.”

There’s a big difference, though, between these same-name commentaries. The WSJ editors’ purpose now includes

• reporting that Wikipedia has banned participants who turn the encyclopedia into what the editors call a “global warming propaganda outlet,” and
• concluding that Wikipedia “deserves credit for finally, if belatedly, stopping it.”

The WSJ editors assert that Wikipedia has “acknowledged it had been hijacked by global warming alarmists who squelched dissenting science.”

New York Times: Russia’s nuclear power industry expanding internationallyIf you have strong memories or beliefs about the Chernobyl accident but haven’t been following nuclear power’s international evolution, you might be surprised by much in the 12 October New York Times business-section article “Russia Is Seeking to Build Europe’s Nuclear Plants .”

Examples:

• Not only does the Russian state nuclear company Rosatom—"the world’s largest builder of nuclear plants"—build reactors in India, China, and Iran, but it is building a small unit in Bulgaria, is preparing a bid on a project in the Czech Republic that’s potentially worth $8 billion, and “is testing the prospect of becoming a major supplier to the European Union.”
• Rosatom “provides 100 percent of the fuel used in Switzerland” and “30 percent of all reactor uranium used in France,” Europe’s biggest consumer.
• A Rosatom subsidiary “supplies about 45 percent of the nuclear fuel used by American utilities, created from diluted bomb material under a post-cold-war treaty to discourage proliferation. About 10 percent of all electricity in the United States is generated from this former Russian bomb material.”
• Rosatom is building 15 of the 60 reactors under construction worldwide. Westinghouse, the largest American builder, “has not completed a reactor as lead contractor in decades.”

The article reports that despite Chernobyl, the Russian “industry never went into hibernation because of public disillusionment with nuclear power, as happened in the United States,” but that “in a nod to the Chernobyl legacy, the subsidiary for overseas construction has said that it budgets for public relations activities in countries where it intends to work.”

Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. His reports to AIP are collected each Friday for “Science and the Media.” He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.